The end of Europe? IV

Utopias appear to be more easily realized than anyone had previously believed. And we find ourselves today before an otherwise harrowing question: How to evade their definitive realization? ... Utopias are realizable. History is marching towards utopias. Perhaps a new century is beginning, a century in which intellectuals and the educated class will dream of the means of escaping utopia and returning to a non-utopian society, less "perfect," and more free.

- Nikolai Berdyaev (1923)

Surveying the future of Europe one last time, we also need to keep in mind that, for all their importance, deep philosophical, spiritual, and existential questions rarely furrow the brows and agitate the minds of most people. (Good thing, too.) Most of their decisions, most of the time, are shaped by straightforward political realities and economic incentives. Europe's welfare states were not born from a vision of continuing progress, but from the socialist vision of heavenly stasis and permanent leisure. More importantly, they were born from the social upheavals and civilizational emergencies of the century-and-a-half ending in 1945. But history never stops: even if you're not interested in it, history is very interested in you. Europe's welfare states embody long-outdated responses to civilizational crisis. They have made it difficult for productive people, between the ages of studenthood and retirement, to sustain themselves economically, much less expand and improve their economic activity, and to raise families. While providing lavishly for the young, old, and sick (they're receiving free benefits no one ever got before - and no one ever will again), welfare state systems of subsidy and taxation penalize responsible adult behavior to an unprecedented degree - often seeing the only way to cushion the burden of high unemployment and low growth in pulling even productive, educated people in their working prime into the welfare state net. This is immoral, crazy, and won't last even another generation: it makes permanent adolescence universal, but drains away all of its benefits. While immediate success is rewarded, continued failure is subsidized, even glorified. Instead of marking an intermediate destination on the way to better things, the prolonged adolescence of welfare state culture is a cul-de-sac, a deadend.* The pervasive underlying principle is the powerful tendency to treat adults of sound mind and body as children, no matter their age - as the prophetic thinkers of the nineteenth century foresaw.

The evidence for such simple reasoning is straightforward: when Europeans emigrate - mainly to the US, but elsewhere too - they respond to lower taxes and less stifling economic conditions by working harder, saving more, and having more children. We can muse, as do Bawer, Weigel, and Berlinski, on hard questions of national identity, Europe's catastrophic modern century, or its spiritual deadness - but let's not lose sight of the obvious. The books of Steyn and Laqueur, in particular, are buckets of common-sense cold water poured on what might otherwise become woozy and interminable Weltschmerz (world-weariness).

All of these authors ask what are the possible and likely futures for Europe. Steyn and Weigel attempt some systematic answers, as does Laqueur, in a more jumbled fashion. None is sanguine. All foresee large parts of urban central and western Europe ceasing to be European in any meaningful way. Some parts will become Islamic, although it's a mistake to view these immigrant communities as monolithic. All of them point to the fact that the big changes have only just started. The biggest will happen in the next couple decades, and Europe is likely to be unrecognizable afterwards. Tourists receive a seriously distorted view by getting such a surfeit of Europe's past - while the ex-pat set (students, temporary and visiting workers) see only the slowly shrinking island of the pampered welfare state lifestyle that is already unaffordable.

The future of the American relationship with Europe. In keeping with our starting principles, this is another subject that requires steady concentration on long-term fundamentals, ignoring immediate episodes of European anti-Americanism, like the most recent one that started in the late 90s and now dissipating.

Until 1917, the US did not interest itself directly in European affairs. European countries were major world powers in their own right, while the US was a new and largely untested power. Almost all of its energy was focused inwards on economic development and political integration. Back then, if they thought about foreign countries at all, many Americans often viewed Latin America and Asia as more important. They were wrong back then - Europe remained a center, if not the center, of the twentieth century's great conflicts. But those Americans then, and their misnamed isolationist cousins of the 1930s, saw a deeper truth. Europe was destroying itself, and the future - for the US - had to be more about Latin America and Asia. That was already evident by the 1980s, but it became central after the Cold War. American intervention in Europe - in four distinct episodes (1917-1919, 1940-1945, 1945-1990, and 1995-1999) - has been founded on the perception that Europe was both important and, at the same time, in so much trouble, that it couldn't straighten itself out.

As Steyn and Laqueur point out - in very different tones - both the US and Europe have, since the late 90s, been focusing on a meaningless rivalry between them, while the heated public rhetoric has ignored the real issues. America's main economic competitors are Asian. Its major, everyday pressing social problem is illegal immigration from Latin America. Its major political problems are internal. Europe's major economic competitors are Asian. Its largest strategic problems are with Russia and the Islamic world. Its major social problems are internal (demographics, welfare state) and externally to the east and south. Europe is in a weaker position to deal with its problems than we are to deal with our problems. For the foreseeable future, Europe will need us more than we need them - just as it has been since 1945. The real change is not Europe's objective condition - in trouble and needing outside help - but in American perceptions of whether it's worthwhile to help Europe. While Europe still needs outside help, Europe is no longer as important as it once was. This fact will be the source of a considerable friction in the years to come. Many Americans don't understand it, especially liberals, who have spent the last 90+ years selling the centrality of Europe as a core principle of US foreign policy. This view will be harder and harder to defend in the coming decades and is another sign of modern liberalism's decline. Certainly, nothing has brought out American liberalism's backward-looking nature the way its colonial-inferiority complex vis-à-vis Europe has. Bawer's book exhibits a strong, lingering whiff of this thinking, although Bawer has spent most of the last decade apparently arguing himself out of his once-firm liberal views on this and other topics. It's even more bizarre given the fact that, until recently, the US was much more firmly committed to liberal political values than was Europe - Europe's continent-wide conversion to these is recent and untested, no matter what the Eurocrats say.**

As we look further and further out beyond the current generation, we must admit that all bets are off. Demographers cannot predict accurately much beyond two generations. It is clear that Europe's native populations will shrink dramatically during that time. In particular, Europe's southern tier and eastern ex-Communist bloc of countries have reached low birth rates that no society, outside of wars and plagues, has ever recovered from. But what comes after is less clear. Right now, the immigrant communities filling in Europe's hollowing-out demographics form compact societies-within-societies, especially the Islamic ones. (This is also true of the Africans, but much less true of Hindus and Sikhs in Britain, whose success is more "American" in nature.) These compact mini-societies might become sovereignties in all but name, just as the western Roman empire fragmented in its last few decades. Or something else entirely might happen - the modern world is not the ancient. These immigrant communities might open up and become far more culturally integrated into their host societies than they are now. Then expect to see a significant decline in traditional religious identities and automatic political solidarity. Although they will remain different for a long time to come, in this scenario, they might become more like the "hyphenated Americans" of 50-100 years ago - on their way to cultural assimilation into Europe, while changing Europe at the same time. This American-style "happy ending" is possible, although I would say now, not terribly likely.

Only time will tell and, as it it always has, holds surprises in store.
---
* The American version is familiar - from the birth of the teenager in the 1940s, captured perfectly in Lolita (the movie, not the novel), to the "death of the grown-up" in Diana West's new book, reviewed here by John O'Sullivan.

** Or perhaps, in their nervous political correctness, they know in their bones better than they know in their heads.

The end of Europe? II

And thus spoke Zarathustra to the people: ".... The time has come for man to plant the seed of his highest hope. His soil is still rich enough. But one day this soil will be poor and domesticated, and no tall tree will be able to grow in it .... I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves .... Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, [the one] no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the Last Man.

" 'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the Last Man, and he blinks. The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small .... 'We have invented happiness,' say the Last Men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth .... Becoming sick and harboring suspicion are sinful to them .... A fool, whoever still stumbles over stones or human beings! A little poison, now and then: that makes for agreeable dreams. And much poison in the end, for an agreeable death .... One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion ....

"No shepherd and one herd! Everyone wants the same, everyone is the same: whoever feels differently goes voluntarily to the madhouse. 'Formerly, all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink."

- Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue (1882)

If Berlinski's is the most perceptive and charming of the recent books on Europe, Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It is surely the most blunt and original, and of all of them, the most unapologetically conservative. In spite of its title, the book is really about the apparently unstoppable decline of Europe, as reflected by its mix of overburdened economies, inability to defend itself, dicey demographics, unsustainable welfare states, and rapidly growing Muslim populations.

It is also a devastating and almost-irrefutable book, cutting through layers and layers of accumulated conventional wisdom and poisoned junk-food residue left behind by the media. It challenges everyone: realists - Steyn dismisses them as obsolete in a shrinking world; liberals - they're largely unwilling to defend their own liberalism; even neocons - can the Islamic world be reformed - really? In Steyn's view, the real problem is not the Muslims of the Middle East, but Eurabia, the alienated and anti-assimilating Muslims of Europe. America Alone is mainly a book about Europe, and only secondarily about America. The United States simply emerges as an historically normal nation-state, Europe as a doomed post-historical project. Steyn's point on this score: the US doesn't need to join the "rest of the world"; it's Europe that needs to rejoin history. It has a generation left, at most. Otherwise, save your dollars and get over there now to have a look-see: Europe is entering its museum closing time.

---

The book's style does sometimes veer into Steyn's newspaper column banter. But it has several intertwined broad themes that control its arguments, and Steyn has obviously given them considerable thought. They encompass the post-1945 evolution of Western governments away from "primary" responsibilities (maintaining internal peace and order, self-defense) toward ever-more expansive "secondary" ambitions (refashioning society, labeling everyone a victim and making them objects of solicitude). From this trend arise the relentless expansion and simultaneous unsustainability of the social democratic welfare state - economically, demographically, and politically. At its heart, modern government's "secondary" impulses rest on an incorrigible tendency by elites to treat everyone else as helpless children.

In Europe, another development is being scribbled over top of the first: the basic conflict between Islam as a political project, on the one hand, and the nation-state system and liberal democracy, on the other. ("Terrorism" and the "war on terror" are merely the violent symptoms of this contradiction.) That makes the emerging conflict different in nature there from here: we view it as a foreign war - in Europe, it's headed towards expression as a civil war - not so different from the streets of Gaza or Baghdad. Finally, we have the confusion and fatuity of many liberal and leftist politicians and thinkers when confronted with these unpleasant facts. Steyn is put into the peculiar position many conservatives find themselves in these days, of defending a liberal political system that liberals themselves helped to build, yet are often unwilling to defend. So conservatives do the job that liberals won't, and conservatives end up in a strange position when they do so. That fact alone explains more about the rise of "neoconservatism" (which is really no more than a kind of "right-wing liberalism") than any number of conspiracy theories.

Steyn deftly grasps the self-destructive dynamic here and wonders if Europe can escape the end result: the dynamic of self-hatred, a manifestation of the self divided against itself. For Euro-Muslims, the divided self is a result of a double alienation, both from traditional Muslim society and from post-modern, post-religious Europe. Islamic culture (especially its Arabic core) is markedly underdeveloped in its capacity for self-examination and self-criticism. The resulting self-hatred is projected outward on to the supposed causes, the West and the allied corrupt Muslim governments. For Western post-Christian leftists (and their self-hating post-Jewish allies), self-examination and self-criticism are hypertrophied; the result is self-hatred projected inward, with typical symptoms: a paralysis of self-interested action and rational thought, the invention and invocation of fantasies ("noble savage," "social justice," etc.), and an inability to defend oneself. In Europe (not as much here), the fully-developed symbiosis draws white Europeans and alienated Euro-Muslims into an intertwining of hatred and self-hatred. The suicidal meet the homicidal.

The radical Islamic project has little traction here - it's Europe where the terror cells are being hatched and the political future is in serious doubt. The attempt to buy off the Euro-Muslims with welfare has only produced a generation of lazy, undisciplined resident aliens with no future in European society, but plenty of free time to watch al-Jazeera and think about how much they hate the infidel West. The other pole of this negative dialectic is represented by the European leaders who lack the confidence to defend themselves and their societies. America has far few Muslims to begin with, and they're better educated and integrated into American society. But there's a flip side to this, as Steyn points out: it's because Americans are comfortable with their "liberal" system (including religious freedom) and willing to defend it, that they also have no difficulty expecting immigrants to adapt themselves to it. For the most part, Europeans lack this confidence, and the result is something very different from here: a large, growing population of alienated Muslims who are neither here nor there, doubly alienated, perfect candidates for radicalization. The origins of the European lack of self-confidence are many. But note the fact that traditional national identities in Europe are being euthanized by the Euro-elites. The intended replacement is a weak EU-identity that many Europeans have difficulty taking seriously and which most Euro-Muslims don't identify with at all. The real difference between the US and Europe is not the religion the media and talking heads keep chattering about; it's that the US has a strong secular, national identity and Europe does not. Europe has not only put its religious identity to sleep; it's even putting to sleep the national identities that, a century or two ago, were supposed to replace religion.

In the long run, it might turn out that the 9/11 attacks will prove to be a turning point in European, not American, history. The attacks were planned by Euro-Muslims, not American Muslims. And their successor attacks have mostly happened in Europe. It is the epicenter of the emergent conflict.

---

Although America Alone -is- a book, not a collection of newspaper columns, it's still studded with the witticisms and zingers we have come to expect from Steyn and that never fail to hit their targets:

• "In the social democratic welfare state, you don't have kids - you are the kid."
• "There are moderate Muslims, but no moderate Islam."
• "Europe is ahead of America, mainly in the sense that its canoe is already halfway over the falls."
• "The EU is a 1970s solution to a 1940s problem ... a quarter-century past its sell-by date."
• "Europe's Muslim immigrants are the children Europe couldn't be bothered to have."
• "[Daniel] Pearl's beheading was the story ... for the jihadis, Pearl [as a reporter] wasn't needed to tell some other story."
• "The non-imperial hyperpower [the US] does not garrison remote ramshackle outposts, but its most wealthy allies, freeing them from having to defend themselves .... Defense welfare is like any other form of welfare."
• "Fighting a war is not a lawsuit, its victims are not plaintiffs ...."
• "As they said of the British at Singapore [in 1942], at least four of those five guns [military, economic, diplomatic, informational] are pointing in the wrong direction."
• "[Multiculturalism] is a kind of societal Stockholm syndrome .... It doesn't involve actually knowing anything about other cultures ... It just involves making everyone feel warm and fluffy inside, making bliss out of ignorance."
• "There are three outcomes to the present struggle: surrender, destroy Islam, reform Islam. We can lose."

Bush is conspicuous by his relative absence, probably because Steyn wants to communicate the fundamental conflict and trends, and they have nothing to do with Bush. Like most conservatives, he's also probably gone through multiple stages of Bush disillusionment, and Steyn aims some bitter barbs in his direction: too wimpy, too indolent, too PC, too tolerant of the Saudis and their system of radical schools, too ready to promote big guvmint and overlook its failures.

Steyn's list of possible conflict outcomes is not exhaustive, as many conservative critics point out. But given that the world is getting smaller and smaller, and given the fact that virtually no Muslim country fits liberal-internationalist criteria as "normal," our options, both liberal-internationalist and conservative-realist, are running out.

The larger melancholy of Steyn's book, clear only in the last couple chapters, is the profoundly unhealthy relationship that has developed between the US and the rest of the developed world since 1945, and especially since the end of the Cold War. This is a world deeply dependent on the US for its military protection; its foreign policy; our demand on world markets for their exports; our ability to absorb the world's savings as investment capital into an economy that is stable, non-corrupt, and growing healthily (a combination that occurs almost nowhere else); our role as an escape for the ambitious and talented stymied in their home countries by oppressive dictatorships and stifling welfare states; a place that develops their medicines, because we still have a semi-free medical system - and so on. America far outspends the rest of the developed world in things military, but that is only because the rest of the developed world has abandoned the ability to defend itself or contribute to a common defense. Given American responsibilities, we arguably don't spend enough; what is definitely true is that they don't spend enough. They have become dependencies, not allies. This is what Steyn means by "America alone": the rest of modern civilization is in not-so-good shape. One of the reasons is a potent source of anti-Americanism: the existence of America - the idea of America - is profoundly disturbing to most of the world's elites who are always doing their best to control, if not outright shake down, the countries they rule. These countries still suffer from the very thing that led to the world wars and the near-destruction of civilization in Europe and Asia: modern economic systems functioning in the heart of (at best) semi-modern social and political systems that can't handle modernistic dynamism.

Steyn's scary vision of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa sliding into a new Dark Ages may be too negative. It's certainly only one possible future. But it is a real possibility, and it needs to be taken seriously.

POSTSCRIPT: Steyn has a Web site and a solid presence in the newspaper world, being one of the best and best-known conservative commentators. (Read his famous interview with Monica's dress.) Listen to podcasts with Steyn here, here, and here; and read a recent talk he gave at Hillsdale College.

A horrifying milestone

PRE-POSTSCRIPT: It's another Middle East sick-humor moment - but it's real: Pakis flee to the relative safety of Afghanistan (via Instapundit). It's also a measure of how rapidly the situation is evolving.
---
There's not much to add to what's been said about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. She wanted to return to Pakistan and, with Musharraf weakening in the last couple years, agreed with Rice and the State Department to a strange "arranged marriage" with the Pakistani government. While there's a lot of tongue-clucking about Bush's policy being dead, the reality is the opposite: it was the old policy of giving Musharraf a blank check that is now not only dead, but dead and buried. Bhutto's assassination was carried out by al Qa'eda-Taliban operatives, extremist groups that owe their existence to Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) service and Saudi money and ideology. These groups do not and have never had widespread support from Pakistanis, and the government's main repressive actions have been directed against liberal and secular movements, not against the extremists.

What Rice and others in the administration realized a couple years ago was that giving Musharraf a blank check after 9/11, when Pakistan decided to at least officially side with the US, was good short-term strategy, but bad in the long run. As with many of these apparently clever "realist" strategies, we're now living in the long run. The era of "he's our bastard" realpolitik is over.

The future of fighting these extremist movements lies with allying ourselves to and strengthening Muslim governments that have greater legitimacy. They don't necessarily have to be electoral democracies. They can also be conservative monarchies, if they are open to reform. Relying on rulers with narrow bases of support is a deadend.

For Pakistan itself, the problem isn't just radical Islam, because in the Islamic world, religion isn't just a belief system as we think of it. Radical Islam comes with a political program (the caliphate fantasy versus nation-states) and social forces (the world of village clans and tribes versus the urban, the middle class, and the liberal). The resurgence of purist Islam is a result of the failure of "modernization," itself a relic of European colonialism. All of these older forms of Westernization had a narrow basis and limited appeal. Without a broader popular demand for better government, the rebarbarization of former European colonies is a real possibility. And because we live in a smaller and smaller world, we will not be able to run away from the consequences.

Mark Steyn put it well:

Benazir Bhutto's return to Pakistan had a mad recklessness about it which give today's events a horrible inevitability ....

Since her last spell in power [in the 1990s], Pakistan has changed, profoundly. Its sovereignty is meaningless in increasingly significant chunks of its territory, and, within the portions Musharraf is just about holding together, to an ever more radicalized generation of young Muslim men Miss Bhutto was entirely unacceptable as the leader of their nation .... Miss Bhutto could never have been a viable leader of a post-Musharraf settlement, and the delusion that she could have been sent her to her death. Earlier this year, I had an argument with an old (infidel) boyfriend of Benazir's, who swatted my concerns aside with the sweeping claim that "the whole of the western world" was behind her. On the streets of Islamabad, that and a dime'll get you a cup of coffee ....

When you invent an artificial country, you better be sure that your artificial identity will stick. Pakistan today is not what the British and Jinnah had in mind, nor Ayub Khan, nor Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, nor General Zia, nor Nawaz Sharif. Instead, across 60 years, their failures incubated an identity that would have seemed utterly deranged to even the more excitable Punjabi Muslims of the early 1940s. As ... noted earlier, according to one recent poll, 46% of Pakistanis support Osama bin Laden.

What should be easy to agree [upon] is that Pakistan is getting worse. Even those who thought at the time that its creation was one of the most unnecessary mistakes in British imperial policy wouldn't have predicted that a mere half-century later it would be a coup-prone nuclear basket-case exporting both its tribal marriage customs and irredentist jihadism to the heart of the western world. Fifty years ago, Pakistanis emigrating to England and Canada brought with them an essentially Britannic education and a moderate Sufi Islam that was not a barrier to integration. Today they bring a narrow madrassah education and [Wahhabi- or Salafi-inspired] Deobandi Islam, which is deeply hostile to assimilation. In other words, what a "Pakistani" is[,] is profoundly different. I liked Benazir Bhutto very much, but she represented Pakistan's past, and her murder is a horrible confirmation of that fact.

I'm sure Steyn would love to be wrong about Pakistan, but there's a good chance he isn't.

A guide for the perplexed I

There is a great deal of ruin in any country.

- Adam Smith

The new French president, Nicholas Sarkozy, recently visited the US and gave an exceptionally fine speech to a joint session of Congress. You can find it here, translated. (Although Sarkozy can understand English, his speaking and writing are shaky. So he spoke in French.) It's certainly one of the best speeches a foreign leader has given in the US in many years. Many liberals were nonplussed by it, since it contradicts their fantasies about Europe. Conservatives were pleased, but confused - after all, he's French.

What gives? It's explained here, but I'll add something else: the critical problem with France, from the mid-1960s on, was the dominant Gaullist dispensation that did not view France as part of the West. Instead, it was supposed to constitute its own realm, with a foreign policy often divergent from Western interests vis-a-vis the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Although the Socialists brought French foreign policy back in a more sensible direction in the 1980s, the Gaullist approach dominated through the end of Chirac's presidency this year. This, in spite of the fact that since the early 1990s, France has been becoming a "normal" country, sharing more and more culturally and socially with the rest of Western Europe and - quel horreur! - the US. Its foreign and economic policies were the late in reflecting this evolution and often seemed stuck in another era. "Official" France did not view itself as being in the same boat as other Western countries, even though, in fact, it has been continuously since the industrial revolution and the rise of Germany and Russia in the late 19th century.

All of that has changed in the last few years. One reason is economic-demographic: France, like the rest of western Europe, can no longer afford its welfare state. Over a third of the country, in effect, doesn't work, while the rest support them. And it does not have enough younger workers to pay for generous retirements (starting at age 53 or so) or for students to remain in school until their mid-30s. Its labor market rigidity, however, also prevents younger French Arabs from entering, or from entering at a high enough level to contribute their full economic potential to the French economy and tax coffers. No doubt, French politicians of the last two generations thought they were being clever by buying off these "youths" (as they're often called when they riot) with welfare, instead of doing the harder but better thing of integrating them into the work force. Much of social integration is economic: when you work in a country's economy, you've taken some big steps towards integrating into that society. Of course, there's more to it than work and money, which don't capture the political and social dimensions of integration. But still, it counts for a lot. When it's missing, disaster results.

Which brings up a second reason: the French are now fully awake to the problem of unassimilated Muslim enclaves growing in their cities. This development poses the most serious threat to France's social cohesion and political sovereignty since the decline and collapse of the Third Republic before and during World War Two. What's more, it's not a matter of defeating a foreign army and pushing them out. The younger Muslims are French citizens, but they are frequently far less assimilated than their parents and grandparents, who originally immigrated to France. Western Europe's post-1945 cultural-religious-political vacuum leads these restless "youths" to look elsewhere for moral and intellectual guidance - with radical Islam being the most popular choice. The French of European culture and descent are frightened of what's grown up in their midst, and their governments until recently were reluctant to talk about the problem in public. Although France has a tough system of antiterrorist laws, courts, and police that has been successful in stopping Islamic terror attacks in the last 15 years, the reality of this problem - like so many of Europe's problems - has been carefully hidden from the public by political elites and the media. A variety of substitute hate objects - Israel and the US prominent among them - fill the void. Only in the last few years, with the problems now so serious that elites can no longer hide them, has the French public begun to wake from its welfare-state narcosis. The formerly high-handed and somewhat secretive French elite was forced to turn to the public at large and run a competitive politics for the first time in decades. The last elections featured four major parties; Sarkozy and his followers in the center-right party (the old Gaullist coalition) swept the field, in part by acknowledging realities that everyone sees but often refused to admit.

---

When we look at Europe's three most important countries - Britain, France, and Germany - a curious spectacle presents itself. France, a frequent irritant to the US in the last 40 years, has swung around to a position of broad agreement with the US, in spite of conflicting views about Iraq. Germany also now has a leader of the center-right, Angela Merkel, an "Atlanticist" of the Kohl-Adenauer type, broadly similar to Sarkozy. But Germany is in a strange position. Unlike France and for obvious reasons, it has not been allowed or allowed itself to exercise an aggressive policy of national interests. While the French have done this vigorously since the 1960s, they often pursued misguided policies - but at least they pursued something. The commitment of Germany's political elites to Western democratic values is real, and they are consistent in opposition to Muslim antisemitism in ways often not true of their French or British counterparts. But such an orientation is essentially reactive and defensive, and it's unclear if that is enough to halt the spread of Islamic radicalism among Germany's growing Muslim population. A weak national government and power decentralized to the German laender (states) and cities, imposed by the Allies in 1945, is the price of a defanged Germany no longer threatening to its neighbors.

The odd man in this trio is now, strangest of all, Great Britain, once America's most dependable ally in western Europe and creator of the original Jewish National Home in Palestine. The long shadow of post-1945 American dominance of the English-speaking world, the end of the Cold War, and Britain's loss of its empire have left it politically hollowed out. While Tony Blair and his government were strongly pro-American and firm on the need to oppose Islamic radicalism, the political elites of Britain have been headed in a different direction since the early 1990s. Britain's official culture of politics and education have been overrun with particularly noxious form of political correctness. It would be reversing cause and effect to say that PC has weakened Britain's national identity. But the rapid and unchecked growth of Islamic radicalism in London and other British cities has created as serious a crisis there as in France; the difference is that Britain, unlike France and the US, lacks clearly articulated and universal liberal and democratic values. Its political culture and national identity have depended historically far more on the unwritten and even unspoken. It seems odd that this should be so; after all, Britain is the cradle of modern liberty, constitutionalism, and democratic practice. The triumph of liberal, democratic, and market-economic values in the modern world is due largely to Britain and its former colonies.

Nonetheless, the weakness of Britain's domestic culture and politics, its inability to face down Islamic radicals, and the spread of intellectual and moral corruption in the face of such challenges are unmistakable. The next posting will explore why.

The depressing decline of Europe

This is a topic perpetually "out there" these days, but we're frequently reminded of the underlying condition by some event or another. Two books and authors getting the most attention (deservedly) are Claire Berlinski's Menace in Europe and Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept. Berlinski's book is more journalistic and fragmented; Bawer's is the better thought out and better written. Read this interview with Berlinski for more.

Why should Americans care? Because Europe is the "other half" of the West and, along with Japan and the US, forms the "old core" of advanced countries. If Europe goes into a terminal tailspin, the US will need a Plan B for many things. Even as it is, the US is the only advanced country with an above-replacement birth rate and strong economic growth. This fact underlies many of the world's current dramatic imbalances (people and capital flows, military strength, etc.). But that topic deserves one or two postings all by itself.

As Jim Bennett likes to say: Democracy, Multiculturalism, Open Immigration -- pick any two. A simple yet profound related thought from Foreign Policy.

You can get a glimpse of what's wrong in Europe these days by considering the disgraceful case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch parliamentarian expelled from Holland. See here for her blog. Check this page out for Web interview videos of Ali. She spoke recently at Harvard. Her appearance was reported upon here, here, and here. (As always, truth-tellers on campus these days are faced with hostile Mulsim students and their pseudo-left PC-brainwashed allies. Remember that Harvard costs $50K a year -- as Ali herself asked, "What do they learn here?" If she only knew. Maybe she should have a chat with Larry Summers.)

Then there's the shameful case of Oriana Fallaci. This is how Europe treats one of its own; the Ali case, how Europe treats one of the Other you hear the post-modern Left chatter about so much. (But you'll hear few of them chatter about Ali.) Myopia and denial constitute the tragedy of the Fallaci case. Ali's tragedy is that an escapee from Islamic fanaticism believes in the Enlightenment values that Europe has either forgotten or repudiated.

A final thought: This topic is a beautiful example of why reading books and quality magazines, along with a few decent blogs, is infinitely better than a junk food diet of television news. When you read serious brain food, you'll actually know more than when you started, and little of the "news" will surprise you. When you consume television news, all you get is a stream of context-free and thus meaningless "news" events. Everything will surprise you. (Newspapers and radio are better, but not radically better.) The purpose of the news industry is not to enlighten, but to shock, propagandize, entertain, advertise, and generate a steady background of anxiety -- all to keep you coming back tomorrow.